JOPPATOWNE, Md. (WJZ)— A chilling story unfolds in Harford County where family members find the chopped up body parts of a missing man. And now, the suspect admits to committing acts of cannibalism on that body.

Meghan McCorkell has the stunning twist to this murder investigation.

Both the suspect and the victim were students at Morgan State University. But it was inside a Joppatowne home they shared where police say an unimaginable crime occurred.

Behind the door of a townhouse on Terrapin Terrace in Joppatowne, a house of horrors. It’s here police say Alexander Kinyua, 21, confessed to eating the heart and parts of the brain of a missing man.

Police say Kinyua’s brother went down to the laundry room of the house and saw a blanket on a box. He pulled off the blanket and saw two metal tins. Police say he opened them and saw a head and two hands. When Kinyua’s brother confronted him about this, police say Kinyua said they were animal remains and not human.

The brother then got his dad. The father went downstairs and the items were gone.

Kinyua’s familycalled police.

“Human remains, specifically a head and hands, were recovered on the main floor of the residence,” Sheriff L. Jesse Bane of Harford County said.

Police believe they belong to 37-year-old Kujoe Agyei-Kodie, a family friend who was living at the house.

The rest of the body was found in a church dumpster on Trimble Road just blocks away.

Two days before the murder, Kinyua was released on bond for another assault.

WJZ has learned Kinyua was in the process of being expelled from school after he attacked another student with a baseball bat in the dorms.

A student who didn’t want to be identified tells WJZ: “I just heard it was a random attack on a student, a student here. He was just walking down and stairs and boom! He just hit him.”

That student suffered a skull fracture, fractures in the arm and shoulder and was also blinded in the left eye.

Kinyua was out on bond when he was arrested for Agyei-Kodie’s murder. His parents were trying to raise funds for his defense in the assault case, holding a fundraiser at a community church in Northeast Baltimore.

Friends say Kinyua had a drastic personality change after he was kicked out of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program in January for disciplinary reasons.

“I heard he may have been a bit out of the ordinary at times,” Damete Roberts, a sophomore at Morgan State, said.

The victim was also a grad student at Morgan State. Agyei-Kodie– a native of Ghana– held several master’s degrees.

He’d lived in the house with the Kinyua family for six months.

“It’s very scary. Especially knowing that it’s so close to home,” neighbor Melinda Kraft said.

It was a grisly murder and there’s still no motive.

Detectives say that so far, the suspect has shown no remorse for the attack. They say that while he is cooperative and has confessed, he would not reveal why he did it.

According to published reports, he recently posted online statements about cults, ethnic cleansing and school shootings.The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is helping in the investigation.

Kinyua was represented by a public defender in court on Thursday.

Police have not ruled out the possibility of more arrests.

The lead detective told WJZ he has no reason to believe that Kinyua was lying about eating the victim’s body parts.

A judge denied bail for Kinyua on Thursday. He’s charged with first-degree murder.